Training & Behavior

The dog got the flap first because the dog gets everything first in this house, by virtue of being loud about it. The cat, Mins, watched from the back of the sofa with the flat disdain cats reserve for inventions they did not authorize. Cedric charged the flap, bounced off it once, then learned to barge through with his shoulder, proud in the way only a beagle can be proud of a bruise he earned himself and now wears like a medal.

Mins did not copy the barge. She studied it. For two days she sat by the flap at the dog's comings and goings, head tracking the panel, the way a person watches a machine they intend to operate before they touch it. On the third she walked up, gave it a single testing push with a paw, felt the give, and stepped through with the unhurried air of someone who had read the manual the dog had torn up and thrown across the room in his excitement.

Then she did something I did not see coming. She started guarding it. Not from strangers, from Cedric. The moment his collar jingled near the flap she would dart in front, block the opening with her body, and stare him down until he backed off, confused and mildly offended. She had learned the mechanism and then claimed the right of way, cat logic at its purest, which is to say logic that ends with the cat winning and the dog wondering what just happened to his bruise.

I think what happened is she realized the flap was a door she controlled, and control, to a cat, is the only real currency. The dog used it. She owned it. The difference between using and owning is the whole personality of the two species in one panel of plastic, and Mins had voted, quietly and finally, for ownership, the way a cat votes on everything, without discussion or appeal.

Living with a flap that has a bouncer

We solved it the way you solve most cat problems, by giving her an alternative she liked better. A second, smaller flap cut into the utility room door, sized for her and not for the dog, gave Mins a route the beagle could not follow. She took to it instantly and lifted the ban on the main flap, apparently satisfied the hierarchy had been correctly established and her position at the top of it confirmed by architecture she had, in effect, commissioned.

Cedric never understood any of it. He still barges the big flap and now ignores the small one, which is exactly the arrangement Mins engineered. I watch it happen daily and I am fairly sure the cat is the smartest animal in the house, the rat is the most attentive, and the dog is the happiest, which is its own kind of win, because a happy dog asks for nothing but the next barge through the door and the next bruise to be proud of.

If you are installing a flap, know that the cat will figure it out and the cat will decide who may pass. Train the dog to use it, then watch the cat redraw the map. You are not the owner of that door. You are just the one who cut the hole, and the cat, as ever, is the one who decided what the hole was for, and who was allowed to go through it, and when.

What I did not expect was how the flap changed the rest of the house. Once Mins had her second, dog-free route, she started using the main flap only on her terms, slipping out at dawn and back at dusk with the air of a tenant who has read the lease. Cedric, banned from the small one by simple geometry, took to waiting by the big flap and escorting her through it, as if he had been promoted to doorman of a club he was not allowed inside. The comedy writes itself, but there is a real point under it: the cat did not just learn the mechanism, she learned the politics, and she arranged the politics in her favor using nothing but patience and a smaller body. The dog, for his part, remains delighted to be useful to a creature who plainly outranks him, which is, I suppose, a kind of happiness.

I have since installed a third flap, this one at the top of the basement stairs, purely so the dog cannot follow her down to the laundry where she has decided the warmest vent in the house lives. Mins now maintains what I can only describe as a three-flapped estate, each with its own rules, none of which Cedric was consulted on. The absurdity is not lost on me: a household of two flaps and a half-dozen unspoken bylaws, all authored by a cat who never asked permission to redraw the floor plan. The dog, for his part, has stopped trying to understand and simply enjoys the parts of the house she permits him, which is most of them, mostly. If there is a moral, it is that the animal who studies the mechanism will outgovern the animal who merely uses it, and the human will keep cutting holes.